1. Field of Invention
The field of the currently claimed embodiments of this invention relates to digital light microscopy, and more particularly to systems and methods for reviewing digitized images of pathology specimens.
2. Discussion of Related Art
The standard method of examining tissue sections under a microscope requires a number of preliminary steps. Specimens are first acquired from human or animal tissues and then are typically fixed in formalin and embedded in paraffin. Thin tissue sections are cut from the paraffin blocks and mounted on glass slides. The tissue sections are stained with chemical and/or antibody-based staining reagents that highlight structures of interest. To review the slide digitally, it is then digitized using a slide scanner, which is essentially a robotic microscope with specialized software. Digitizing a slide produces a single whole slide image (WSI) from each glass slide. Whole slide images are typically stored as a pyramid of images of decreasing resolution. The images are typically organized in a tiled format that allows rapid retrieval of subregions from the image. At full resolution, these whole slide images can have a density of around 0.25 micrometers per pixel and gigapixel sizes. Adoption of digital or “virtual” microscopy has been slow. While there have been improvements in the speed and quality of scanning hardware, image viewers and viewing techniques have remained stagnant. There is little variation in the viewing software provided by commercial interests. Conventional whole slide image viewer software implements a relatively standard “pan-and-zoom” interface which attempts to replicate interaction with the microscope using a mouse or similar input device. In a typical “pan-and-zoom” interface, the user is presented with a viewport displaying all or a portion of the WSI at a given magnification and location. Using the mouse and on-screen user interface elements, the user can increase or decrease the magnification of the image (“zoom”) and translate the WSI in the X and Y axes (“pan”). Compared to the relative ease of operating a microscope, navigating digital slides is unintuitive, cumbersome and slow. This results in lost productivity and user frustration. There thus remains a need for improved systems and methods for reviewing digitized images of pathology specimens.